Last month, actor James Franco spoke with Annette Insdorf about his portrayal of Allen Ginsberg in the movie Howl, and specifically about how he developed his own version of Ginsberg’s unique voice. Today’s featured recording is of Ginsberg himself, reading “Mind Breaths” in a 1977 appearance at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.

The poem, as he introduced it that night, was inspired by his study of samatha meditation, which he learned from Chögyam Trungpa, a Buddhist monk.

“Samatha—as distinct from Zen style—is paying attention to the breath leaving the nostril and dissolving into the space in front of the face,” Ginsberg is quoted as saying in Barry Miles’ biography of him. “There is constant daydreaming and drifting away from that attention to the space. You’re constantly waking up—mindfully waking up to the actual space around you, into which you’re breathing. You use the breath as a handle to get back into that space.”

Thus crosslegged on round pillow sat in Teton Space—
I breathed upon the aluminum microphone-stand...
I breathed upon the teacher’s throne...
I breathed further...

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [14 MB]
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92Y Podcast: From the Poetry Center Archive: John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains

In a rare public appearance, legendary journalist John McPhee returns to 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center on Monday, December 13, to read from Silk Parachute, his latest collection of articles. It is his first visit to the Poetry Center since 1989. He’ll be joined by Ian Frazier, who will read from Travels in Siberia. Both writers will be introduced by Mark Singer, their friend and fellow New Yorker writer.

Today’s featured recording is an excerpt from that 1989 appearance, when McPhee read from Rising from the Plains—the third volume of his geological tetralogy, Annals of the Former World. In the narrative table of contents to that book, which was some twenty years in the making, he wrote that:

Rising from the Plains is primarily about Wyoming, which includes within its borders an exceptional range of geology. It’s about the roadcuts of the interstate but also about Jackson Hole and the Tetons and the Powder River Basin and the Wind River Basin and the Laramie Range and David Love and his father and especially his mother, who educated her children at Love Ranch, a very long ride from neighbors, in the geographical center of Wyoming. She was born in 1882 and died long before I would have had a chance to meet her, but she is probably the most arresting personality I have encountered in the course of my professional work.

McPhee refers to his guide David Love as “the Grand Old Man of Rocky Mountain geology.” Love’s mother—this “most arresting personality”—is Ethel Waxham, and after McPhee had spent some time in Love’s company, he let him read Waxham’s journal, which tells the story of:

A slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist [stepping] down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West. She arrived in the autumn of 1905, when she was twenty-three. Her hair was so blond it looked white. In Massachusetts, a few months before, she had graduated from Wellesley College. . . . In addition to her skills in Latin and Greek, she could handle a horse expertly, but never had she made a journey into a region as remote as the one that lay before her.

Writing Rising from the Plains, McPhee remarked before his 1989 reading at the Poetry Center, “I got into a dialogue with [Miss Ethel Waxham]—writer to writer, author and subject—speaking back and forth across most of a century. I couldn’t resist this duet. There was so much wit and elegance in the way she put things.” During the reading, as you’ll hear in the recording, he attempted to replicate this duet, asking his wife Yolanda to read the diary entries that are woven into his narrative.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. To purchase tickets to the reading on December 13, please click here. To look at the rest of the season’s line-up, please click here. And for access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [15 MB]
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"As though I’d stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece." So said Philip Roth after "hungrily" reading through the recently published Letters of Saul Bellow.
Saul Bellow first appeared at the Poetry Center in November of 1956, reading from a novel-in-progress that would become Henderson the Rain King. Upon the book’s publication, in 1959, Bellow wrote to his friend Ralph Ellison about its critical reception:

The fighting about poor Henderson has been fierce and wild, and to make matters worse I’m not quite sure where I myself stand. For I’m not in possession of my head and don’t know what parts of the book originate in gaiety and which in desperation. It’s easy enough to see through the prejudices of the critics and to assess their vindictiveness against the new and the unexpected, but it’s not as though the book occurred as a pure act of the imagination. . . . I’m inclined to set the whole of Henderson down to dizziness and begin to think of a new start.

Bellow’s second appearance at the Poetry Center didn’t come until 1988. By then, he’d written Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet, won three National Book Awards and the Nobel Prize.

Today’s featured recording is an excerpt from that 1988 appearance, when he read from Humboldt’s Gift.

"The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit," writes Bellow in the novel’s opening sentence. "Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for." The character of Humboldt was loosely based on the poet Delmore Schwartz. Though there are no letters to Schwartz in this new collection, some of Bellow’s thoughts about his friend are included in a letter to Eileen Simpson, author of Poets in Their Youth:

What were John [Berryman] and Delmore and Cal [Lowell] about, really? I admired their poems, I relished their company; but I was so deeply immersed in my own puzzles, programs, problems that I drove past in my dream-car. . . . Something like that. Not without feeling, no; I certainly felt for them, but I was a thousand times less attentive than I was capable of being. It came home sharply to me as I read your memoir. I suppose that if John and Delmore hadn’t been such entertainers, comic charmers, stylists, if they hadn’t had hundreds of intriguing tricks in presenting themselves. . . . But really it does no good, this remorse for being so like them.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [16 MB]
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92YTribeca Podcast: Herding Donkeys, Howard Dean and Ari Berman: The Future of the Democratic Party

On October 5, with the midterm elections exactly a month away, The Nation magazine political correspondent Ari Berman talked about his new book Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics with Howard Dean which tells the inside story of Dean's visionary yet controversial fifty-state strategy, charts his unpredictable journey from an insurgent presidential candidate in 2004 to the chairman and conscience of the Democratic Party and shows how President Obama's campaign—particularly its groundbreaking embrace of grassroots organizing and activism—built upon Dean's blueprint. The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel moderated the talk. This podcast features the full program.

The Unterberg Poetry Center’s 72nd season opens tonight with an appearance by Margaret Atwood, who will read from The Year of the Flood, her most recent novel. Ms. Atwood will be introduced—and then interviewed, after her reading—by Valerie Martin, her friend and fellow novelist.

Tonight is Ms. Atwood’s eighth appearance at the Poetry Center. Today’s featured recording is an excerpt from her very first, in March of 1975. That night, she read from a collection of poems, You Are Happy, and was introduced by Grace Schulman, then-Poetry Center director, with the following words:

Margaret Atwood’s poetry is remarkable for its wide range of tone, from whimsy to controlled panic. She writes with detailed accuracy of unfamiliar creatures—giant tortoises, pig-men—illuminated by radiant light and yet issuing from a dark center. Her poems embody a vision of the universe in which love and truth are weapons, and where impulses to murder and create are one impulse. She sees a world in which freedom for the hunter obtains death for the victim. Its people identify with gods they have endowed with brutality and endlessly repeat ritual acts without knowing why.... The poet explores love and destruction with first-hand immediacy.

The series of short poems in this excerpt tell the story of Odysseus’s visit to Circe—but from Circe’s point of view. “For me, poetry is a foray into the unknown,” Ms. Atwood has said. “And it sometimes opens up areas that I later go into with electric light and explore more thoroughly in prose.”

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. To purchase tickets to Ms. Atwood’s reading, please click here. To look at the rest of the season’s line-up, please click here. And for access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [23 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [32 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]

W.H. Auden’s affiliation with the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center began in our very first season (1939) and continued for more than thirty years. His last appearance was in 1972, and today’s featured recording is an excerpt of that reading. Here is how Richard Howard introduced him that night:

We are fortunate to have with us this evening not merely the citizen, the school-master, the church-warden and the other members of the best repertory company in poetry today. We have the poet himself, who at 65 is so familiar and yet so unrivaled.
Unique in our time in that he believes in knowledge, knowledge in the poetry, and extending the scope and range of inquiry and response beyond the condescension of mere public appearance. If you have been keeping up with him, which means keeping up with what glory can be given to the English language in our generation as well as his, you know that, these days, under the sign of a consented-to mortality, he is concerned with boundaries, limitations, definitions, the precarious identifications which make our life possible—the naming, which was Adam’s first task and Auden’s to the last, or to the latest. Hence the famous and extraordinary vocabulary and the wonderful meter—you will notice in a minute that he does not read his poems off the page, but out of his ear—and all those alliterative bells and charms. That is a magic neither black nor white. That is full color.

Howard ended his introduction with this casual couplet:

For decades, Wystan Hugh Auden has devised new ways to broaden the mind of the age.
Often, as right now, from this very stage.

Auden began with several late poems—“Natural Linguistics,” “Epistle to a Godson,” “Lines to Dr. Walter Birk,” among others—but today’s excerpt comes from the second half of his performance, when he read a group of early lyrics. The excerpt culminates, as the reading did, with his recitation of “Metalogue to The Magic Flute,” which was composed for Mozart’s bicentenary in 1956 and includes the following passage:

How seemly, then, to celebrate the birth
Of one who did no harm to our poor earth,
Created masterpieces by the dozen,
Indulged in toilet-humor with his cousin,
And had a pauper’s funeral in the rain,
The like of whom we shall not see again.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [17 MB]
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92Y Podcast: From the Poetry Center Archive: John Dos Passos: “Art and Isadora”

Today’s featured recording, from January of 1965, is an excerpt from John Dos Passos’s only appearance at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. He begins with some remarks on his development as a writer after World War I, then reads a section on dancer Isadora Duncan from the second volume of his U.S.A. trilogy—The Big Money.

Before Dos Passos took the stage that night, critic Robert Gorham Davis introduced him thusly:

Mr. Dos Passos has carried on in all his writing for nearly 50 years a frustrated, anguished love affair with the United States as a whole. We have to look to Balzac and Zola to find fictional undertakings of similar scope. Dos Passos, moreover, has gone beyond his masters in the form and texture of his work. He is a painter and poet, a dramatist, an impressionist, an expressionist in the color, the imagination, the technical inventiveness of U.S.A., with its cameras-eye, its newsreels, its biographies both fictional and historical. There is a zest for life, a feeling for the changing social moods and moments of an epic, for the discriminabilia of time and space that far transcend anything merely naturalist or sociological.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here. For more information about the final event in this season’s Main Reading Series—The Poets’ Theatre: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell with actors Kate Burton and Michael Cumpsty—please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [16 MB]
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92Y Podcast: From the Poetry Center Archive: William Carlos Williams: A Sort of a Song

The first-ever Poetry Center reading was given by William Carlos Williams in October of 1939. That fall, the following notice ran in the Y Bulletin, announcing the inaugural season:

The Poetry Center of the YMHA hopes to serve as a nucleus for disseminating attitudes and values about poetry which will make the art increasingly accessible both to the special student and to the layman... The Center will sponsor a series of readings of their own poetry by eight distinguished poets. These include: William Carlos Williams, Genevieve Taggard, Merrill Moore, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes. Readings will begin at 9pm. Admission is 50 cents.

Though Dr. Williams read at the Poetry Center many times over the years, there is only one audio recording of him here—an appearance in January of 1954. Today’s featured recording is an excerpt of that evening.

In an introduction to his collection Wedge (1944), he wrote:

When a man makes a poem—makes it, mind you—he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their exact significances—into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here. For more information about upcoming Poetry Center events, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [15 MB]
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So exclaims Holly Golightly in the opening pages of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, having entered the narrator’s apartment via the fire escape, and such is how Truman Capote introduced his heroine when he read from the novel here at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center on April 7, 1963. Today’s featured recording is a selection from that evening.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published in 1958, and the film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn was released in 1961, so when Capote asked the 1963 audience if they’d like him to read a section of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, everyone was downright thrilled.

Before the reading that night, then Poetry Center director John Malcolm Brinnin, who was also a longtime friend of Capote, offered these introductory remarks:

In the very curious sociology of these times, the name of Truman Capote has become a household word. . . . He no longer has to write a book to make news, but simply to be Truman Capote. No one is surprised anymore to learn that this young American writer has been quietly dining with Princess Margaret, or that he has been spirited off on the yachts of Greeks richer than Mycenaes, or that he has recently flown to Amsterdam to have a tooth filled.

But let us be wary of the disguises of genius. Anyone who knows Truman Capote knows that the columnists capture the details but miss the point. Beyond the public image of Truman Capote there stands a very private man, who owns one of the toughest, most resourceful and surgically adept minds in modern letters. And if we now must note that the boy wonder has become the prodigal son, that is all the more reason why I am happy to invite you to join me in welcoming him.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here. For more information about upcoming Poetry Center events, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [16 MB]
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On Thursday, distinguished literary scholar Helen Vendler returns to the Poetry Center to lecture on Walt Whitman. In celebration of Professor Vendler’s visit, today’s featured recording, from 1973, is of actor James Earl Jones reading passages from “Song of Myself.”

I too am not a bit tamed. . . . I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Professor Vendler will be examining three groups of Whitman’s lyrics and sequences: poems of the self and others; poems of erotic intent; and poems of the Civil War. In years past, she has utilized these annual talks—on Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, George Herbert and W.B. Yeats, among others—to articulate thoughts which eventually find their way into book-form.

Listening to Helen Vendler is “like entering the mind of the poet,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. To purchase a ticket to Professor Vendler’s lecture, please click here. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here. And for access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [18 MB]
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Avrom Sutzkever, the Yiddish-language poet who died January 20 at the age of 96, lived the tragedies and glories of modern Eastern European Jewish culture. He had his start as part of the Young Vilna literary movement and melted lead type into bullets in the Vilna Ghetto, from which he helped save Jewish cultural treasures, including his own manuscripts. His mother and young son were killed in the Holocaust. After the war, he was a witness at Nuremberg, and later—already a world-renowned poet—he came to Israel, where he was at the center of the Yiddish literary community and founded and edited the greatest Yiddish literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt, until its final issue, in 1995.

But if we dwell on merely the biographical details of the man, we are in danger of overlooking the importance of his work, which is indebted to Sutzkever’s epic life but also independent of it. Sutzkever’s work was outside the boundaries of school or ideology while benefiting from many of them. Like Marc Chagall, he was a virtuoso of the fiddle, the rose, the dove, and the rain, which in his hands became not cliches but inexhaustible possibilities. Even when the wellsprings of Yiddish culture dried up and it became ever narrower, Sutzkever found new depth in his craft, as if following his own map to buried meaning.

Sutzkever's first reading at the 92nd Street Y was in February 1964 for the Yiddish-Hebrew Poetry Series. His second and last appearance here was on May 6, 1991 when he was introduced by Irving Howe and joined by translators Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Today's archive recording features Sutzkever reading his poem Inside Me in Yiddish. You can read the Harshav translation here.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time. For access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here. And for more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

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Jamaica Kincaid returns to the 92Y Poetry Center tonight to participate in “The Immigrant Experience: Becoming Americans”— an evening of readings from and discussion of the new Library of America anthology Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing. She will be joined by fellow contributors Jessica Hagedorn, Norman Manea and Gary Shteyngart, as well as the anthology’s editor, Ilan Stavans, who will moderate the conversation. Their readings will include the work of Edward Said, Edwidge Danticat and Joseph Brodsky.

Ms. Kincaid last read at the Poetry Center in January of 2009, and today’s featured recording is an excerpt from that program, when she read from the short story Wingless and the novel My Brother.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time—many of whom, like Jamaica Kincaid, are returning this season. To purchase tickets to tonight’s event, please click here. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here. And for access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [6 MB]
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Oates herself has called Jury “a work of astonishing vision, breadth, intelligence, and audacity. Elaine Showalter, long recognized as our preeminent feminist scholar-critic, whose prose shimmers with wickedly funny asides, has produced the most ambitious and brilliantly executed book of her career.” It’s a book to be read as a companion to Showalter’s earlier study, A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.

A Jury of Her Peers includes sections on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks—as well as Oates herself. Here is what Showalter writes about her friend:

“In the late sixties, she published three remarkable novels, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969). All were nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for them in 1970. . . . All three novels use male narrators, the male point of view, or masculine themes. Oates never used a masculine pseudonym, but she clearly identified with the passion, frustration, and energy of her heroes; we could even call the series ‘portraits of the woman artist as a young man.’ Like Flannery O’Connor, she wanted to be a great American writer, which in terms of the era meant also to be a male one. Her interests in the destiny of women, the creative freedom of the woman writer, and the function of art itself, were muted in the novels, but always breaking through into the main texts.”

Of course, since the publication of them, Oates has written numerous books on numerous themes—most recently A Fair Maiden, which came out last week. It’s a canon of works which fellow novelist Jane Smiley has called The Museum of Joyce Carol Oates—“a wonder of imagination and invention.”

Today’s featured recording is a conversation, from 2007, between Oates and Roger Rosenblatt.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time—many of whom, like Joyce Carol Oates, are returning this season. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here. And for access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [35 MB]
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“Some winters, taking leave, deal us a last hard blow,” writes Richard Wilbur in the poem “A Storm in April.” Mr. Wilbur’s poem praises a late blizzard which delays the Spring:

But the bright, milling snow
Which throngs the air today—
It is a way of leaving
So as to stay.

Here at the front-end of a new winter, we offer the poetry of Richard Wilbur—so full of grace and gratitude and good-will—as today’s featured post, recorded in May 1985.

Mr. Wilbur, who first read at the Poetry Center in 1950 and most recently this past May, is now eighty-eight, and yet he shows no signs of slowing. His new collection, Leavings, will be published in 2010.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here. For more information about upcoming Poetry Center events, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [30 MB]
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